Five-Eighty is a novel about a private detective working in the suburbs of the Bay Area of California in the early 1970s. Each Saturday morning a new installment appears. As the events of this novel take place during the election season of 1974, the story will be released during this, the election season of 2024. May it prove an entertaining distraction from the news of the day. Please enjoy, and as always, comments are welcome!
—HF
Chapter 11
“And what are you supposed to be?”
The voice is my wife’s, at the door. This is not the first time she has said this tonight, for it is Halloween, and our doorbell has been under constant assault from tiny, greedy fingers. Usually this sort of exclamation means that the child or children standing on our stoop, begging for candy, is not wearing one of the four stock costumes of cowboy, pirate, vampire, or ghost. “Come look at this,” I hear, and I turn around in the avocado green settee by the fireplace to glance towards the door, and spot an imp wearing what appears to be a set of cardboard beer boxes, papered over and decked out in old stove knobs and screens made from tinfoil.
“Is he a robot?”
“No!” The voice from inside the cardboard, though muffled, is high and squeeky and frankly rather annoyed.
“Are you Mission Control?” My wife asks, her tone of voice all lace doilies and teacups. “In Houston?”
“No!” I swear I hear a little stomp. “I’m a tee-vee!”
Laura: “Here you go.” The rustling of little hands in a cheap plastic pumpkin filled with candy. A tiny, hollow, cardboard-muffled, perfunctory “thank you,” and the door closes.
My eyes, meanwhile, are in my lap, on the yellow sheets of the legal pad there. At the tip of my old blue Cross, a blot of black-blue ink was spreading onto the page, wearing through the pages below, staining everything. I lift it, blow on the blot to dry, then attempt to mentally kick myself into gear. On the left-hand side, in a small column, I write the days: Monday 10/28. Tuesday 10/29, Wednesday 10/30, Thursday 10/31. Next to them, in a column, I pen in $200 for each, and next to that some estimates of the gas I spent on, but then scratch out the $200 next to Monday. The total is $606, give or take, the amount of money David Carpenter owed me so far for the work that I had done. Below all this I penned in some thoughts:
- Q: Is Santini with Iris? Probably not. Maybe?
- Q: What is Santini up to? Probably a drug habit.
- Q: Is Iris up to something? Don’t know.
This, in total, is what Carpenter’s money has bought: A whole lot of nothing.
I cap the pen to keep from spreading it all over the page again, and consider whether I should just write out an invoice in the morning and beg off the job, or if I should keep going. As it is, there’s not much I can tell Carpenter, and I have the distinct impression that if he doesn’t like my results, he’ll just not pay me, and good luck getting anything out of him in court. I never gave him a contract, just a verbal agreement in the Three Star. Sure, I could give him circumstantial evidence that his partner was a drug user, but that didn’t amount to much. It occurs to me that Carpenter never gave any real explanation of why he thinks Santini and his wife were at it, nothing to work on at all, just the admonition to follow Santini. Maybe news of Santini’s drug habit is what he was actually fishing for? Some kind of dirt, so he could push his partner out? Maybe, maybe, maybe—too many maybes.
The door rings. More little ghouls and hobgoblins. I spell Laura for a bit, then she’s back at the door.
“Did you ever think it’s weird,” I ask her, refilling the plastic pumpkin with miniature Mars Bars, “that election season overlaps Halloween?”
“They both have villain themes.”
“True.”
“I hope the election goes well in the rancho, all the same.”
“The incorporation vote?”
“If Rancho Santa Rita becomes a city, it will make development far cheaper and easier, and there will be a building boom.”
“They really need a new name, though.”
“It is such a mouthful, but shortening it will be tough.” The doorbell rings, and a small gang of cowboys gets their payday. After they’re gone, Laura picks up where she left off. “You can’t call it ‘rancho,’ it sounds like a town filled with trailer parks. And Santa Rita is just one more California vanilla town. People will think it’s just Santa Rosa’s evil twin sister.”
“Maybe they can call it Phoebe. Or Appleton. Or Hearst. Her house practically overlooks all of it anyway.”
“I don’t think ‘Hearst’ is a good name right now.”
“Maybe they can call it Tania.”
“Hah, hah, hah.” Doorbell, costumes, candy. Shut door. “Whatever they call it, it means a city sewer system, water system, police department. Increased taxes but those increases will actually drive some of the farmers to find a higher and better use, which usually means tract houses. There’s enough land in the proposed boundaries to build houses well into the 1980s.”
“Won’t the developers have their own agents, though?”
“Sure, but who stays in the same tract house for long? More houses means more reselling.”
“Why don’t you go get dinner rolling. I’ll watch the door for the next hour.”
Laura relinquishes her stool to me, and walks off towards the kitchen. “They should slack off a bit and start getting older, it’s getting darker.”
Perhaps they should slack off some, but it feels like the pace picks up if anything. I become the beaches of Guadalcanal, and the costumed hoards outside become the USMC. I refill the pumpkin bucket twice, then start to break into the ever-unpopular candy corn. The costumes are the same as always, ghost, ghost, Dracula, cowboy, ghost, pirate, ghost. Once or twice, there’s a combination pirate ghost or cowboy ghost, and I suspect these are children playing Halloween tourism, up from the poor flats of Richmond with money only for a hat, a sheet sufficing for the remainder of the costume, here to gather in the higher quality candy of Arlington Boulevard and environs. Poor them, they have not reckoned with my tardy supply runs, and go away with the tooth-destroying, waxy weirdness of the candy corn. Then there are the elaborate costumes, mostly older children who wear vacuum-formed and brightly painted plastic face masks from the local dime store: Colonel Sanders, Spiderman, Superman. I refill the bowl, and smell the intoxicating smell of frying onions and peppers and sausage wafting from the kitchen. A lull, and I get up and go to investigate, but get cut off in the dining room by Laura, who is standing in front of the old buffet table again, rearranging the picture frames on top of it for the umpteenth time.
“What are you making?”
“Minestrone with sausage.” She tucks a framed photo of her mother closer to a more recent photograph of her father. “I felt like we needed something comforting.”
“Put Nick in front of my Mom and Dad, and you can squish the whole shebang a bit further from the edge.”
Laura looks up at me, then the photos, sees what I see, and pushes the constellation of frames a little more towards the center. “Good idea, that way if anything happens….”
“It won’t”
“You never know.” She makes a few minor adjustments with her fingers, then declares “there!” and wipes them on her knee-length skirt. “I’d better check on the soup.”
I return to door duty, but the pace is certainly falling. For some reason, the night’s cavalcade of costumes has me unnerved. All the masks, all the roles these children were learning to play, all to get their candy.
The phone in the kitchen rings. A few beats pass, and Laura comes up behind me.
“Phone. For you. A client.”
I stand up. “I’ll take it in my study.”
“I’ll hang it up and take door duty for a bit. The soup will be fine on its own for a while.”
I walk into what was once the front bedroom, a simple box with a set of sliding glass doors onto a northward facing patio. Sitting in the orange plaid armchair behind the walnut desk, I pick up the plasticky receiver of the extension phone and say my name. I hear Laura click the receiver down on the other end, and then a familiar voice.
“Chisholm? Carpenter. Any news?”
“Not much.” I stand up and carefully walk to the door, stretching out the coiled phone line to reach it, then use my left foot to slowly and gently shut it. “I haven’t confirmed your suspicions as yet.”
“Have you disproved them?”
“No.”
“Well you have more opportunities ahead. Friday night I leave for a business trip—doesn’t matter where, really—and anyway I won’t be back until Monday. If Richard and my wife are having an affair, this will be an opportunity they won’t be able to pass up. I want you to get back to following Richard. Catching them in the act.”
For the first time, it occurs to me that maybe David Carpenter is the one having the affair, and he wants to find a reason to end the marriage, penalty-free, and be with his own lover. “Did your wife mention any weekend plans of her own?”
“Something about golf on Saturday, painting on Sunday. It’s probably all a ruse.”
“Well maybe it would make more sense to just wait and see if Mister Santini appears at your house, or if she leaves to meet him?”
“I don’t want you to meet my wife. Especially not after that debacle at the Mark Hopkins. I still don’t understand why you were there. I hope I’m not paying for that.”
“No, no, I was there because of my father.”
“Your father? What’s he got to do with any of this?”
“I mean it was personal, not business. It won’t be on the invoice.”
“It better not.” Then Carpenter hangs up.
I consider crossing out yesterday’s two hundred on the legal pad, but then remember that he agreed to pay me by the day, not the hour. This makes me unreasonably happy, as does the quick mental math that he’s now specifically asked me to keep working the case through the weekend, another three days, another six-hundred plus expenses. The smile disappears when I remember that golfers get up at the crack of dawn, all the better to get on the course in the cool morning. Is that still a thing, even in the relative chill of San Francisco Bay? I sigh. Probably it is. So that means I’ll need to be up early on Saturday, and despite Carpenter’s constant nagging, the smart money was to wait out at Belvedere at the bottom of the road to his house and watch for Santini to arrive or Iris to leave.
Well, hopefully something will happen, at last. And maybe Carpenter is right: A whole weekend free, there’s no way that two secretive lovers wouldn’t take advantage of that. So if it happens, or if it doesn’t, delivering an invoice to Carpenter on Monday and calling the job done seemed more and more plausible, and more and more likely to actually result in getting paid. I liked this new plan, even if it meant finding an excuse for Laura about getting up and going to work in the Saturday pre-dawn.
I walk through the hall and slip through the pocket door into the great room. From across the space, Laura asks me who had called.
“Oh, a developer I haven’t worked for before. I’m doing some work for him that is time sensitive and he wanted to make sure he got to me tonight.”
“He said he called the office but didn’t leave a message. How did he get our home number?”
“I don’t know, I must have given it to him.”
“Was it really that important?”
“Yes. He thinks there’s a deal going on that he is being excluded from.” It was mostly true. “I’m supposed to watch a meeting at a golf course on Saturday morning and see who shows up.”
Laura frowns, and the doorbell rings again. She opens it, and on our stoop is a boy wearing an adult’s London Fog rain coat, a crumpled, moth-holed old brown fedora, a woman’s sunglasses, and a giant white bandage on his nose.
“Oh, what happened to you?” The concern in Laura’s voice is palpable.
“Someone tried to cut my nose off!”
“Why would anyone want to do that?”
“I don’t know, it’s in the movie.”
“Movie? Who are you supposed to be?”
I step closer. “He’s Jake Gittes. From Chinatown.”
Laura frowns. “Your parents let you watch that movie?”
“Where’s the candy?” Was the child’s reply. Laura sticks out the plastic pumpkin, and he rustles around in it, but manages only to get a small bag of yet more candy corn. “You got anything else?”
“No,” I respond. “Candy corn is all that’s left.”
“Buptkis,” was his reply, but he takes the small bag of sugary poison anyway and leaves.
Laura closes the door. “They let him watch Chinatown? The movie has incest in it! It seems wrong.”
I take the pumpkin bucket from her hand and set it down behind the door, then flip off the porch light. “Come on, we’re done for the night, let’s go eat some soup.”
Laura nods and we turn to walk towards the kitchen.
“You know,” I say, following her, “I don’t really get that movie. Why did Gittes see it all the way to the end?”
“He was paid to.”
“Sure, but after he almost gets his nose cut off, doesn’t Faye Duniway offer him a check and tell him to go away? And doesn’t he tear up the check and keep going?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think you’re remembering it right.”
“I’m pretty sure. And I just think, why? You nearly lost your nose. Why wouldn’t you just cash the check and go? He’s not in love with Faye Duniway. At least, he’s not then. Maybe later, but not then. He’s got a thriving practice, he’s got enough employees and has his own building and a car and probably a nice house in Glendale or something. He doesn’t seem to need the business that bad, and he sure doesn’t need to lose a nose.”
“That’s simple,” Laura replies, setting out her mother’s old china on the dining room table. “He wanted the world to make sense.”
More each Saturday!
Enjoy this installment of Five-Eighty? Watch for future installments every Saturday morning during Fall, 2024. The next intallment will post on Saturday, October 7th, 2024. Previous chapters can be viewed here.
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Harbour Fordyce 